The smell of bullshit....

In the light of recent (and all too often) experience, I want to make one thing clear: my bullshit detector is second to none.

Tea and wine tasters have nothing over me. I can smell a million shades of bullshit, and see it a mile away.

This is partly why I get so annoyed when recent "graduates", foolishly thinking themselves lord and masters of the intelligencia, try to pull one over on me. There's nothing quite worse that being on the receiving end of bollocks, and enduring the smug satisfaction upon the communicator's face as they revel in their wildly inaccurate belief that they're telling you something new/made-up. They are, in effect, saying you're stupid. Do they think I was born yesterday? Do they not realise just how well-battled a skeptic I am? How logical my cogitative faculties? That I know what a dangling modifier is, or correlative conjunction for that matter. If you push me, I can even tell you the difference between a gerund and a present participle?

Of course, polite gentleman that I am, I rarely proffer the retort they so richly deserve. I recall Richard Dawkins mentioning in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, in the chapter entitled Hoodwink'd with Faerie Fancy, how children of a certain age can't believe that anyone knows anything other, or more, than what they know. This happens either before, or after (I forget), they become completely gullible and believe anything anyone tells them. Most of us grow out of that. Some don't.

Anyway, let them have their cake. Mine's home made, organic and there's nary a humectant in sight!

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Happy New Year, you bunch of animals...

Yes, yes. Happy New Year and all that. Tally ho!

So, let's start this year's blogging with another rant shall we?

There's been a real brouhaha over this human-hybrid embryo business. One minute it's unethical to harvest the Human eggs needed for implantation of Human genetic material and when an alternative, and more efficacious, "animalian" source is used, well the Frankenpress go to work on their "First Born" like mutant hybrid horror stories.

"He [Blair] said there were "difficult" issues surrounding creating the embryos, which are more than 99% human but have a small animal component. "

...but I would like to make just one comment on terminology. Now I may be wrong, in an ecumenical sense, but it was always my understanding that Humans are in fact animals. I wasn't aware that we had reclassified Humans to give us our own taxonomic Domain or Kingdom? Nor Class, Order or Family for that matter. Thus the issue being described in terms of Human-animal hybrid is somewhat bizarre and I would like it to stop. Stop it. Right now. Ssh.

So, fact check: they're talking Human genetic material inserted into a non-Human egg cell. They're not talking invasion of the Monkey-Boy hybrids here. They're talking cells, to study cells and purely in a scientific context.

As for the public consultation, I'd love to know just whom they consulted, no doubt readers of The Sun, Star, Mirror or Daily Mail for that matter; or people who get their scientific information from celebrities on Big Brother. Such is the level of scientific illiteracy in the UK at the moment, I'm not sure I'd trust anyone to give a fully informed opinion on any matter of bioethics. Hell, given the successful franchise in public fear that the Government has fostered so carefully, I'm not sure I'd consider anyone's idea of ethics full stop. Too much hype for sense and sensibility.

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